


The Call and the Slaughter

by Lavos



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-24 23:24:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13821657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavos/pseuds/Lavos
Summary: A Roegadyn man inducts adventurers into the fold.





	The Call and the Slaughter

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Conrad's Nostromo.

It was a frequent joke amongst the gathered adventurers that the proprietors of the local businesses, the carpenters, the botanists, those who sat in the shaded stalls in the marketplace, and even those who took up the sword in protection of the wandering merchants who passed from settlement to settlement with vials of this and packages of dried that, were all lacking in imagination. A real person, someone with strength and conviction, would take the new land for what it was worth and make off rich and respected. But strength and conviction had not been enough, and the best and brightest had fled from the Cartenau Flats with their tails between their legs, their Gods having lacked the same strength that drove mortal men to fight on that dusty plain. The brave had perished and the remainder lived now in the uneasy stasis of having gone through an apocalypse that only failed for seemingly arbitrary reasons, the great wyrm simply vanishing, taking Dalamud and the combined forces of the Grand Companies, the greatest raised army that Eorzea had ever fielded, with it. After the dust had settled and the coastal and inland townspeople had taken their first steps into the fire drenched night, human movement had resumed. Eorzea would rebound. The corpses would be moved to marked graves and new trade routes would be plotted among the aetheric fragments. Flash frozen Ishgardians would simply produce heavier coats. The Empire would move back and erect new Castrums. Monetarists would continue to plot even as the Ala Mhigan refugees, old in their suffering, waited in the caves under this, the shadow of their second tragedy. In large and small ways life would continue. It was a perverse existence in some ways, as it made the death that much more tragic and pointless, but it was one whose grim normalcy seemed to hang on the end of a sword. The desperation of the scavengers gave way to bravado when common modes of commerce and travel resumed and thus the adventuring class was born.

The windows of the Carline Canopy hovered on the very edge of transparency and in fact the building was lit primarily by lanterns, which shone brightly, along with the errant flame, erupted either by magical aptitude or by the simple mechanism of a flint and served often as the prelude to smoking. It was in one such prelude that Ribiero, an axe wielder of the widely known seafaring Roegadyn but who had lived on and off in the forests since the Calamity, surveyed the room from his stout wooden stool. It was a standard collection of adults with the smooth unscarred complexions of teenagers, breath caught short and in wanting at the sight of a man taller than Miounne, who herself was much taller than the majority of the Hyur who had been used to the praise of that most simple and unwarranted of virtues, height. There was a certain virulent energy in the room. The swords were no longer held with consternation at their weight or price but wonder as to how it would look cleaving through the flesh of some rough monster sitting on a pile of gil in a hole somewhere, unearthed now for the crafted boots of new wayfarers. The mind of the new adventurer, thought Ribiero, could not think of the reality of the blood spraying out from the wounded monster or the sharpened sword nonetheless getting stuck in the flesh, caught by a tangle of muscle and the sucking air pressure, the tired and watery eyes of some creature looking up at them with motions approaching fear. They were fine folk and that aside had convictions about how the world now worked. The end times had not come despite the signs and now the apocalyptic happening were broken up and scattered along the countryside. They would believe anything glorious, he decided, even the truth.

Ribiero was a man at town with the people who gathered at the Canopy and in turn was out of sorts with the seafaring folk to whom he ostensibly belonged. In start and by order of material reality, the forests of Gridania, under the impassive yet ever present hands of the elementals, were not the seas of the Thalassocracy and the plants bit more than the imperials, who waited in their wall to the east. There was nothing grand that distinguished him from his fellows. Certainly he was as large and as strong as was to be expected and his axe split open many a skull. He was of a moral character, not great but at least consistent, vowing not to harm women or children in that passive way that principled men often chose to make up for their sword arm. No, he was a man who enjoyed word too much for the taciturn merchants, serious at their plight of being another set of holds to plunder for the Garlean ships, and who boasted too much for the pirates. Indeed, it was at a knife's point he was driven from the taverns for talking of a raid on his fellow pirates, now citizens, that was seen as a matter of course in the olden days before the Admiral, the whole affair with the moon, and even the city proper, but was now in effect high treason. He went along the coast, through the verdant jungle, and hitched a ride on the cart of a diremite web merchant, bound as it were to travel back to the Deepcroft outside of Gridania. He had a distinguished look about him, his silver hair and beard radiating experience and sharpness that wasn't wholly unearned. So too were the knicks on his axe, an impressive piece made for two hands, that towered above the diminutive polearms and conjuring rods, but paled in comparison to the truly fearsome weapons wielded by the real warriors, axes of such weight and magnitude that Ribiero had thought, after seeing them outside the hot spring on the old Nymian border, was some sort of tool for twisting the metal beams used for railroads. He had experience, yes, and was a man whose forays with the pirates in their carved sea caves, plundered weapons crashing against the rough stone hewn out by the Sahagin in a further along umbral age, would later be eclipsed by the retroactive recognition of the Sastasha excursion and its erstwhile members. Still, he loved the word and the word loved him, and the failed but jolly pirate had yet become a heroic figure amongst the inn dwellers.

Ribiero, who had in the private sanctuary of the inn room practiced often the motion of bringing a pipe to his lips did so then with the gracefulness  
of an actor going on stage for the first time, the eager looks of the crowd drowning out any residual doubt. The afternoon light flared up through the glass, shining in lines and spots in the cloud of acrid smoke and the persons gathered shifted uncomfortably in their purchased vestments, waiting for Ribiero to finish smoking and speak. "I see that there are some who still wish to face the world," he said, exhaling white smoke, the crowd tight in their throats at this remark, every man looking with surety and every woman with the quiet dignity of expectation. The much maligned lay people, to their credit, simply milled about with their cards or drink or work, content not to face the new world's dawn if it was content not to face them. This was fine to the Roegadyn man, who pounded his chest, pushing the uninterested out of the pace of his speech. "To pick up a sword is bravery!" he shouted, "A cane, a spear, an axe! The steel arm of the warrior can be forged from anyone, it only requires courage!" Sliding the ax out, he waved it over the lantern light, a red spot glowing under the metal. He raised it, the reflection widening, a small hued sphere of light forming in the speckled reflection. "Dalamud... the fall of the moon was tragic. Who amongst us cannot say we lost someone to that tempestuous moon?" At this, everyone nodded stoically. "But we are still here! And in that ash, monsters crawl out, and the realm is confronted at all sides by the damage that awful violence had visited on us. Where are the heroes," looking around the room slowly, "who would protect this fair place and in turn find themselves sitting on the glory of victory for the weak?" In the silence, despite being enraptured by the speech, they were not his, not wholly, but belonged to the same starless and dark sky that hung over the failed first and second prisons of the Wyrm, which was there despite everything and after everything. They were lost in its breadth, which stretched before and after, enveloping that misery that had otherwise defined them. To jump in and be the master of that pain, it was intoxicating. Ribiero knew that the crowds that gathered around him did not cheer for him but for the portrait of themselves as champion and it was just as well, for the older Roegadyn no longer had the appetite necessary to consume as large a meal as the peace of the realm. Without adventurers there would simply be guards and fortified routes, encampments, and the tangled bureaucracy of the Grand Companies and their institutional patrons would eventually be overwhelmed when the Garleans stepped out again into the light. This he believed with a real conviction. The future of Eorzea was to be framed by slaughter on both ends, the terrible weight of that moonless night and all that came after.


End file.
